Russia. 7 essential classics of his literature. Have we read them?

The World Cup. There is already entertainment in the world for a month until next July 15. And this year it is being celebrated in that immeasurable, beautiful and fascinating country that is Russia. Today I dedicate this article to 7 of his most representative literary works and 6 fundamental authors of its history. And it is possible that if we have not read them, we have seen a film adaptation. I confess that I lack Guerra y paz, but the rest are to the credit.

The russians and me

Part of the parish here that knows me knows that for reasons that escape me, or I have not yet been able to identify well, I am a Russophile. Will be my love for the cold and the open spaces, or for the melancholy so associated with the Russian soul. And as I said a few days ago one of my favorite poets is alexander pushkin. But I don't know, the fact is that this land and its people attract me and they have also been the inspiration for one of my novels.

I had to do my research for a story set in World War II and that's why I read that crude Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Life and destiny by Vasili Grossman, and La motherby Gorki. The Anna Karenina of Tolstoy or The DocThor Zhivago I had read them long before by Pasternak because they have been in my house for as long as I can remember, apart from seeing various film adaptations. And the Russian forbidden tales Afanásiev gave me a perspective that I did not know.

And yes, I have Guerra y paz as surely half of the mortals of the world who have been content to see his film version with the faces of Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer. But there are so many writers and literary works so fundamental that Russia has produced that there would not be enough articles to comment on them.

7 classics

Ana Karenina - Lion Tolstoy

There is little to say about Leo Tolstoy. It is enough with your figure of one of the greatest writers not only Russian but from world literature. Ana Karenina, published in its final version in 1877, is considered his most ambitious and far-reaching work. Realistic and psychological in nature, this novel provides an extraordinary description of Russian society at the time and shows fierce criticism of the declining aristocracy, its lack of values ​​and the cruel hypocrisy that prevails.

It coincided with a deep moral crisis in the author that led him to write this shocking story of adultery. Its protagonist, Ana Karenina, is doomed to a tragic end driven by guilt, the search for good and the fall into sin, the need for redemption, social rejection and the internal disorder that this rejection causes.

Guerra y paz  - León Tolstoy

Were seven years of work and 1 pages That induce, at least, patience when you pick up the book. It is possible that for this reason, the icy Russian steppe, Austerlitz and Napoleon and the multiple conflicts between the protagonists, there are so many of us who have backed down. Then we have the faces of the elegant Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer in the lavish, and also long, film production that signed King Vidor in 1956. And we have preferred it to paper.

In Tolstoy's novel the vicissitudes of the lives of numerous characters of all types and conditions are narrated throughout some fifty years of Russian history. And so we find the campaign of the Russians in Prussia with the famous battle of Austerlitz, the campaign of the French armies in Russia with the battle of Borodin or the Moscow fire. While the vicissitudes of two Russian noble families intertwine, the Bolkonska and the Rostovs. The connecting element between them is the count Peter Bezeschov, around which the complicated and numerous relationships are narrowed.

Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Banned for many years by the communist regime, this is the stark chronicle of the network of Soviet internment and punishment camps where millions of people were imprisoned during the second half of the XNUMXth century. Solzhenitsyn was confined to one of them and painstakingly reconstructs the life inside. three volumes and are written between 1958 and 1967 and it is an essential document about the time.

The Doctor Zhivago - Boris pasternak

Boris Pasternak was poeta, translator and novelist, and in his youth he rubbed shoulders with Tolstoy or Rilke. This is his masterpiece, which received harsh criticism from the communist regime and made him an outlaw author. But it also led him to get the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958.

Yuri Andréyevich, Dr. Zhivago (who will always have the face of Omar shariff) falls in love with Larisa Fiódorovna. The love story between the two, passionate, tragic and impossibleIn the atmosphere of the Russian Revolution, it is one of the most remembered in literature and also in cinema.

Life and destiny - Wassily Grossman

As exciting and moving as it is hard to read, Life and destiny, is an immense tapestry of human histories has been compared with the previous ones of Guerra y paz o Doctor Zhivago. They are testimonies such as the pain of a mother forced to say goodbye to her son, the love of a young woman under the bombings or the loss of her humanity from the soldiers on the front lines. Also essential for those of us who are lovers of Second World War.

La mother - Maxim Gorky

Another great, Máximo Gorki, has perhaps his greatest achievement in this work. The writer was inspired by events that occurred at the Sornovo factory during the 1905 revolution. And it perfectly reflects his blind belief in a true and possible revolution capable of improving the existence of man.

Russian forbidden tales - Alexander N. Afanasiev

incluye una selection of stories from erotic to anticlerical that this journalist and passionate Russian folklorist of the XNUMXth century was in charge of compiling and of which I have already spoken in this article.